


For Success

by lightgetsin



Category: Scandal (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Madame President Mellie, alternate universe role reversal, fashion porn, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:51:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're too young," was the first thing Olivia Pope ever said to her, while their hands were still clasped in a shake. </p>
<p>"I know," Mellie said. Too young to be president even if she were a man. And good genetics along with a lifelong skincare regime didn't help, either. The American people, as a body, couldn't spell gravitas if you gave them a dictionary. But they sure as hell wanted it.</p>
<p>"It's fine," Olivia Pope said. "I can sell it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Success

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishafel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/gifts).



She wore a black pencil skirt, black pumps, a pink waterfall blouse, and a modest string of pearls. It was a little bit school girl, and a little bit sexy secretary. Her mother made her change shoes before she left – half an inch more height on a slimmer heel, putting a second _va_ in _va va voom_. It was a little less subtle than Mellie would have chosen.

At least until she and her father got to dinner and she met Fitzgerald Grant for the first time. He was handsome, socially adept in a have-to-think-about-it way, and rather in love with his education. He hated his father. She wondered if he even knew that.

Mellie walked in with a quiver of tension zinging up and down her spine. It was an audition. Was she beautiful enough, did she have taste, did she have manners, was she polished to a prime-time ready finish? That part was easy enough; Mellie could satisfy Jerry Grant with one hand and her Smith degree tied behind her back.

The real question was his son. Was he the right kind of good-looking, was he articulate, did he have that deep-down gormlessness of an overbred horse? Check, and check, and check. 

Mellie could have gotten out of it if she wanted to: out of dinner, out of the exchange of phone numbers, out of the follow up date just the two of them. Out of the marriage. Her father would have been annoyed -- Jerry Grant was a genuine big fish – but there were other fish. And it would have made her father happy in a way, fed that cute self-deception he had about how everything he did was to ensure her happiness.

But Mellie didn't get out of it. Because what she thought as Fitzgerald Grant talked to her cleavage about corporate taxation rates and their fathers smiled over their scotch, what she thought was, _You will be useful to me_.

*

She wore St. John on the campaign trail for most formal events, mixed in with dark-wash jeans and modest tops for rope lines and roadside restaurant photo ops and all the staged casual circus. Her clothes, like everything else on the campaign, were a maddeningly complex dance of subliminal signaling and contradictory messages.

"You're too young," was the first thing Olivia Pope ever said to her, while their hands were still clasped in a shake. 

"I know," Mellie said. Too young to be president even if she were a man. And good genetics along with a lifelong skincare regime didn't help, either. The American people, as a body, couldn't spell gravitas if you gave them a dictionary. But they sure as hell wanted it.

"It's fine," Olivia Pope said. "I can sell it."

The two of them spent twelve hours the following day sorting through Mellie's entire wardrobe, paring it down and making a shopping list. Something started there, with Olivia sitting unselfconsciously on the floor of the walk-in closet in her Nina Ricci dress and jacket – pale yellow jacquard wool, beautiful – combing thoughtfully through piles of suits, holding up a strand of Tahitian pearls against each one. At the time, Mellie thought it was the beginning of her formal campaign. Becoming president was like childbirth: long, boring, frustrating labor in the Senate, then push-push-push forever at the end, the hardest work of her life. She thought it was just that, the beginning of the big, dramatic effort. It wasn't.

"You have beautiful taste," Olivia said, looking up from a dark blue Armani Collezioni jacket with an intricate origami collar and hidden placket. Her eyes were still calculating, weighing Mellie down to the molecules before deciding how to repackage her.

"Thank you," Mellie said. "So do you."

They nodded at each other across the piles of clothes, and bent their heads back to work.

So Mellie dressed with exquisite care. St. John to age her, just enough. Pearls and chunky lapel pins to help that along. Sleeker cuts and small, stylish details to keep her well clear of frump. Heels never more than 3 inches, no peep toes, no stilettos. A great deal of makeup designed to look like very little makeup. Hair cut short, and often up out of her face.

Olivia came in to Mellie and Fitz's hotel room every morning before the first public event of the day. Mellie had a dedicated stylist, as well as a separate makeup artist. They were both terrified of Olivia.

Mellie and Olivia would stand side-by-side in front of the bathroom mirror and talk quietly about projecting authority, and just the right soupcon of sex appeal, and looking like a mom or a best friend or a school teacher or the leader of the free world.

The morning of the Iowa Caucuses, a few pieces of Olivia's luggage lagged behind at their last hotel, so she showed up in a dark-red crepe Escada jacket and skirt, but no jewelry. Mellie was wearing a far more casual Anne Klein checkerboard sheath dress for her breakfast meeting; she would change into jeans and a blouse in the car on the way to the first of eight voter outreach events today. 

"Wait," Mellie said impulsively, after Olivia had nodded brisk approval over the day's selections. Mellie's jewelry case had spent the night in the hotel safe, but it was currently open on the unmade bed. Fitz was already gone off to a community center breakfast; their schedules didn't rejoin until the lunch barbecue event. Mellie padded over to the bed on her stockinged feet and considered.

"Here," she said, turning back with a string of round-cut sapphires set in white gold.

"Oh," Olivia said, one hand going to her bare neck. "Senator, I—" It was the first time in nearly a year of acquaintanceship that Mellie had ever seen her even faintly rattled.

Mellie stepped close and draped the necklace, carefully working the lobster clasp at the nape of Olivia's neck. Olivia's protests died on her lips. She was wearing a hint of perfume, something warm and spicy that, on a difficult to describe level, matched the color of her suit.

"Fitz's father gave me this," Mellie said. "The day Jerry was born." Olivia's hair was up, the whole length of her neck bare. "Your neckline needed a little something, don't you think?" Mellie said, and stepped back.

Olivia blinked, and slowly smiled. "You know I admire your taste," she said. "Thank you."

*

She wore blue silk pajamas and a matching robe the night they decided, the group of them sitting in a circle and talking so late it was nearly morning. Fitz knew nothing about it and, please God, never would. Katie Couric had once asked her a question about "the love of your life," and it had taken Mellie several seconds of confusion to realize who she meant. It was just so strange to apply that idea to Fitz. Or to herself. She loved him – that had come with familiarity, along with the expected contempt. Keeping the two in careful balance was the work of a marriage, as far as Mellie understood it. And as for herself – Mellie had never expected to find a love of her life. Had banked on not doing so as a fundamental part of her plans.

"It's risky," Olivia said. "Putting aside the legal aspects. And the ethical."

There were people in the world who believed that winning only counted if you played by the rules. The idea seemed to be that there was something ruinous in cheating, that the prosperity to come would never last, or must taste sour if it did. Mellie was in her twenties before she understood that some of the people who said those things genuinely meant them. Fitz certainly did. For herself, she thought there was extra cleverness required, extra skill and daring to evade all the arbitrary rules and win anyway. Olivia saw it both ways, which appeared to be somewhat painful.

"We need to decide now," Mellie said. She leaned forward and made eye contact, one person after another. Olivia was last. "All in or all out," Mellie said. "Are we stealing this election?"

They were.

*

She wore a hospital gown for the procedure. The pregnancy was three or four days too advanced for a simpler chemical solution. Bad luck there; Mellie's cycle had become a little irregular in her forties, and the stress of the job didn't help, so she hadn't noticed right away. Bad luck compounding on top of a wild improbability. The one time she and Fitz had the space and the interest in months and months, and at her age . . .

Mellie studied the ceiling as the IV went in – "Just in case, Madame President." She was supposed to be in a national security briefing right now. Cyrus was taking it for her. He didn't know why, and he might or might not buy the stomach bug story.

Mellie had not particularly wanted children, or particularly not wanted them. They were compulsory, of course, she'd always understood that. So she'd gotten it done, even if Jerry's conception and birth did not . . . exactly go to plan. She'd felt a great sense of accomplishment at their births. The animalness of labor was disturbing, the way it broke her down. But Fitz was there, unexpectedly steady, gratifyingly focused. Babies transformed his uncomplicated, puppy love from their early marriage into something else.

Mellie had not foreseen loving her babies the way she did. She had never loved anyone like that, so how could she have known? And it didn't happen right away, in that instantaneous rush everyone talked about. So when it didn't come, Mellie shrugged it off, to the extent she noticed at all.

It took months for each of them, not until they were talking. But for both of them there was a very particular day, a moment when Mellie looked up from laundry and fundraising forecasts and constituent correspondence to realize that this was a person, a person she was making. A person she loved so fiercely, so wholly, so dangerously. 

It was ironic now. Motherhood had been absolutely necessary to achieve her goals – that box must be checked, a family built. But starting all over now with a newborn could be disastrous. The President of the United States could not go unexpectedly into labor, or leak milk through her breast pads in the middle of the G-8 Summit. 

Well, she could. But it wouldn't play well without an absolutely immense effort of narrative control. And Mellie just had too much else to do.

Also, she'd responded as ambivalently to this late-life shocker as she had to her first two pregnancies. She wasn't horrified, she wasn't ecstatic.

And, in the end, pregnancies weren't the only thing that could come out-of-season. Mellie didn't need to have another baby in order to have her psyche pried open again, in order to love someone fiercely, wholly, dangerously.

*

She wore nothing at all between cool sheets. The Residence was quiet around her, empty of everyone but a few carefully hand-picked to keep her secrets. The children were back at school for the year, and Fitz had left that afternoon for a ten day west coast tour to promote his new veterans' mental health initiative.

He'd known. Mellie didn't know how he knew; his sources of information were increasingly obscure to her, which was a problem that did need addressing. But he'd been icily polite when they parted on the portico outside the Oval Office. 

Mellie wondered if he was thinking of leaving again. He'd tried it twice: once, half-heartedly a month before the general election, and again, far more seriously a year later. Mellie had squashed both attempts with gamesmanship and a little blackmail; she'd been more brutal the second time, and she'd thought it would stick. Fitz was not unintelligent; as much as he was still confused, fifteen years later, about how she had stepped in on the career he'd intended for himself, he knew how this had to work. He couldn't go anywhere.

It was pretty funny, actually. He'd accused her of cheating periodically for the entire length of the marriage. This man or that man had the wrong look in his eye, danced too close at fundraisers, came to dinner too often. He was almost unerringly wrong; he seemed to fundamentally misunderstand her taste. But there was something reliable about it, those spurts of masculine panic that came, quite predictably, whenever her political star rose a little more. But for all that, he'd been amazingly oblivious to the actual affair she'd conducted under his nose for months on end. For a man who thought she'd been slutting it around the party for two decades, his extravagant hurt and betrayal when he'd finally found out was a bit much.

The floor boards in the hall creaked. Mellie had only one bedside lamp on. Olivia glowed in its warm light when she came in. She was wearing cream-colored cashmere from neck to ankle. 

"Hi," she breathed.

"Hi." Mellie sat up, holding the blankets to her chest. It was cold tonight. And still thawing between them as they carefully came back to each other after a long, awful separation.

Olivia slipped out of her coat and draped it carefully over the back of a chair. A dark green DVF sheath followed, and then her stockings, each peeled down briskly but delicately. Her jewelry went onto the side table with a quiet rattle – diamond solitaire on a short chain, matching earrings, gold watch.

Olivia came to bed bare from head to toe. They turned into each other, fitted their bodies together, kissed slowly. Mellie was reminded oddly of their first kiss. It had not been cautious like this one, not at all. It had been vicious and out-of-control, the two of them clinched together in front of the mirror in the prep room right before the final primary debate. Mellie had won that debate wearing Olivia's lipstick, because Mellie's had smeared off and they only had Olivia's to replace it.

They'd taken turns breaking each other's hearts a good half dozen times since then, but who was counting. It didn't seem to matter, not really. 

"There's a problem in New York," Olivia said, leaning back. "I'm not sure what yet, but there's a money trail, and it leads right to the state party. You're going to—"

Mellie placed a finger across her lips. "Shh," she said. She bent and nuzzled at Olivia's neck. A woman's body -- this woman's body – was a revelation. Mellie wanted to dig her fingers into Olivia's muscled thighs, bite into the softness of her breasts. "Shh," Mellie said again. "Stop being useful to me. Not now."


End file.
